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Taking arts into the digital era

By Stuart Cunningham - posted Thursday, 28 June 2007


The proposal to close Humanities and Human Services has been portrayed as a worrying part of a trend toward further "marketisation" of higher education.

The pure humanities must be part and parcel of any higher education system. The values of independence of mind, critical thought and curiosity about the world, and the disciplines that teach them, must not be eroded by managerial fiat or postmodern relativism.

But there still must be a market for such "non-market" disciplines in any given university. That is to say, there must be sufficient students of sufficiently high entry score to justify offering such courses. This has not been the case at QUT for some time.

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Universities must increasingly "choose their poison". They must concentrate on their strengths and seek to complement each other in an overall higher education system. The old days of a small number of elite institutions offering all disciplines have long gone.

QUT's philosophy is to embed pure disciplinary inputs into professional applications. The success of this approach in the Creative Industries Faculty is seen by the surge in demand when we first opened the faculty to new students in 2002 and it has remained high since.

Not everyone likes the Creative Industries project. Clearly, this includes Hookham and MacLennan, who appear uncomfortable with our desire to renew the arts for a contemporary digital age, and those who see it as a poor substitute for the pure humanities.

But our undergraduate student demand remains high because we offer a responsible balance between critical intelligence and preparation for professional practice. Our research student numbers have skyrocketed since the faculty started. Our research in applied humanities is nationally and internationally of the first order.

We must be doing something right.

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First published in The Courier-Mail on June 22, 2007.



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About the Author

Professor Stuart Cunningham is director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. His Platform Papers paperback What price a creative economy? (Currency House) was released in July 2006.

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